Malachii wrote on May 1, 2012, 14:48:I dropped cable a year ago and my family gets along fine with netflix and Hulu+. Whats not clear to me is whether this change would impact the paying hulu+ crowd?

Good question. I haven't looked too deeply into this, but my guess is Hulu+ isn't making enough money and cable companies are willing to pay them more for this exclusivity. No huge surprise, Hulu hasn't exactly been profitable and its owners have been trying to sell it for years.

Malachii wrote on May 1, 2012, 14:48:I dropped cable a year ago and my family gets along fine with netflix and Hulu+. Whats not clear to me is whether this change would impact the paying hulu+ crowd?

If they are so stupid as to lock out people who they were able to convince to pay for the Hulu Plus service, I'd venture to say that they are too stupid to remain in business.

In my case, because I have Comcast Business Class internet with TV thrown in free (which was never hooked up), technically I'll be okay. But the way this reads I'm getting that you need to have an active cable TV subscription in order to use Hulu at all, which if true, is so brain-suckingly stupid that it almost compels me to want to commit violence against the terminally stupid people at cable companies.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

As a loyal paying consumer this new strategy isn't totally confusing for me yet. Is there some sort of new equipment or cable standard I can be forced to buy to further lock down what I watch and cause further incompatibilities with my older equipment?

Also, if I remember correctly isn't Hulu run by a consortium of big cable networks? Or at least is was formed by them. All of the networks have pretty much stated time and again they hate free streaming and have refused to make it anything but a huge pain in the ass via their own solutions. I mean, they're even trying to stand up to Netflix which is at least a business model where people get paid. They're just trying to sink the ship while they still have a little control.

Not to mention you can't magic away technology by passing laws or throwing arbitrary requirements in consumers faces. People have shown time and time again that they will get around barriers to the content they want.

All they will do is drive it even further underground through private memberships and encryption. They will also piggyback it on legitimate content whenever possible which makes enforcement even more difficult.

It seems to me that they're banking on the virtually inevitable passing of a SOPA style law. The UK has just made ISPs block The Pirate Bay and eventually something will be passed in the US when people get bored of putting up resistance time after time.

They'll be in for a shock when it turns out that SOPA will do the square root of fuck all.

How can they still not get it? How is it possible that after a decade of rampant unconstrained "piracy" of their shows they still don't understand the free, legal alternative has to be BETTER and work with a minimum of fuss?

Hulu, which attracted 31 million unique users in March under a free-for-all model, is taking its first steps to change to a model where viewers will have to prove they are a pay-TV customer to watch their favorite shows, sources tell The Post.